The Seasonal Reading Challenge discussion
GROUP READS
>
Middlesex
date
newest »
newest »
I started this book a few months ago, but halfway through I gave up. I decided to give it another try, when I saw it was one of the group reads, and I made it all the way through this time, but I'm not overly impressed. The overall story about the family is interesting and I enjoyed reading about most of the characters. The story about Cal and the struggles of being intersex is enough to write an interesting book, and that's probably where my problem with the book lies. Sometimes I felt there were too many things going on. There were Cal and his story, the family's story, Greek history and American history... And it was all intriguing, but maybe just too much.
Eugenides presents an interesting conundrum in his aptly named Middlesex. The main protagonist is born genetically male but exhibiting mostly female physical characteristics. How Calliope comes to grips with her/his problems can easily be generalized to include many abnormalities that beset many people which become accentuated as the individual reaches puberty. The other story lines in which Calliope's parents and grandparents view her circumstances add some weight to the plot. The fact that the author chose to present the story from multiple first person accounts is a bit confusing at first, but allows the reader to gain insight that might not be possible via other approaches.
The setting of Detroit at different times in history showed how much a place is dependent on the economic circumstances of its major industry. The rise and fall of this city with its dependence on the structure of the auto industry is sad but predictable.
I feel like there should've been a bit less about Cal's other family members because it just seemed like there should've been a bit more to Cal's story.
After 10 years on my TBR I finally read it. A dense fascinating story. A sprawling family saga and American history epic yet also an intensely personal story about identity.
Mod
Dlmrose wrote: "I thought Eugenides did a great job of connecting the Greek-American epic family story with Cal's personal one. I thought the "monster" passage was very moving. I really liked this clever book."Yeah - that monster passage was heartbreaking.
READ 6020.10 Transgender Fiction Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Total points 40
This is not a book that I would normally have picked up and maybe that is why I found the book contrived and somewhat difficult to follow. I did appreciate the details ad history that were used i this novel but I found the ending to be less than expected judging from the rest of the book. The author took great pains in building the background to explain why what happened happens but then seemed to run out of ideas and insights at the end.
When I started reading this, I have to admit that my heart sank - I really didn't like the author's style to begin with, and I strongly dislike narratives that jump back and forward in time. However, as the story progressed, I was completely drawn in by the tale of Desdemona and Lefty, and eventually the wider saga, and the dense style became more settled as the allusions to classical mythology revealed themselves. The novel's intertextuality, in that sense, was skillful and satisfying to read.I felt the gender identity theme was actually overshadowed by the family history and I agree with one of its reviewers, that the fourth book seemed to have been "tagged on" at the end of another story. Although the threads tied themselves back together at the end, I feel that this really could have been two, or even three, different novels.
Great read, though, thanks for including it in the Group Reads task - looking forward to discovering some new material next season!
I decided to re-read this for the group read (I could also have re-read Beloved, too, and Katie up and Down the Hall wasn't available at my library). I last read it right after the paperback was released when I was in grad school (and then he won the Pulitzer AND came to speak on campus so I was pretty glad that I read it ahead of time).With this re-read, I was confirmed in my memory that the historical sections of the book (the Greco-Turk War that Lefty and Desdemona flee - so many of those scenes are chilling; the family's experiences in Detroit during Prohibition; the riots in Detroit (there was a weird juxtaposition of some stereotyping of black characters/ignoring reasons for the riot and the accurate portrayal of urban decline and white flight)) felt the strongest. Cal's story of adolescence, which was still an interesting story, felt a bit jumbled, as if all the different competing theories of gender identity and gender expression in the 1960s/1970s needed airing on the page in some way.
As an interesting aside, when Eugenides came to speak, while he signed my copy I tried to ask him why he chose not to give the Object and Chapter 11 proper names - they're the only two named this way - but it came out as "Why did you name Chapter 11 'Chapter 11'?" and he gave me the "professor" look and asked if I'd read the end of the book....which I had. *headdesk* Why did all my words get stuck together? :p
For all those kindle SRC readers out there, if anyone's interested, Middlesex is in the kindle summer sale.
Nick KYI could not get a copy of "Katie up and down...." and was not all that interested in it anyway, and I've re-read Beloved twice in the past year alone, so I had to choose this one. Otherwise I probably would not have. But, like Toni Morrison's other masterpiece Song of Solomon, this book made me appreciate historical Michigan, or at least a slice of it.
Calliope/Cal ended up being a very endearing character, rotating within the miasma of a Greek American family. The hermaphroditic angle was never the only axis of the story. Maybe that's why it seemed lopsided sometimes. But as historical fiction, this one is O.K.
I finished this a few days back. I liked it a lot and gave it 4 stars. I would have preferred more on Cal's insights and story (like it was said earlier in this thread) and less on the family history. Thanks for selecting another great book that I may not have read otherwise!
My review of it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...
I do think this was a good book but I’m a little conflicted. I loved reading the Greek history and family traditions, US history from an immigrant point of view and the impact on Cal’s family. I was just disappointed there wasn’t more of Cal’s story. I felt the book rambled a bit and the gender identification issues were overshadowed by family history. It also felt strangely unemotional to me. Almost like the author was trying too hard to get the reader to accept Cal by providing soooo much family history, what they were going through and why they made the choices they did. Overall, I enjoyed the book though.
I started out not sure whether I would be able to finish this - the style was more literary than I'm comfortable with - but as I went on it became more interesting and by Book Three I couldn't put it down.I hadn't known anything about the book before reading it for this challenge, and I'm not sure whether it really fit "transgender fiction" since the main character was hermaphrodite (now often referred to as intersex). I think of transgender as someone who feels that they were born as the wrong gender, but Calliope didn't have that feeling. She only decided that she was a boy after reading the doctor's case file.
It was decent historical fiction although perhaps too much of a soap opera, tying the family into events from the different decades. The description of the Ford assembly line was very good. The description of the start of the Nation of Islam and black nationalism was also interesting (view spoiler).
I really, really did not like Desdemona. Since fully half the book is given over to Desdemona, that made reading this a very hard slog.
Mod
After thinking about it, tho, I realized that I was just being impatient, based on my own expectations, and that as long as I was enjoying the various stories that intertwined, I should just enjoy it. And I did - once I accepted the book on its own terms, instead of being annoyed that it wasn't getting right to what I had initially expected, I liked it quite a lot.
I like the way the author narrates the family history with the immigrant family.
I just finished listening to the audio of Middlesex. I had read the book back in 2003 and had given it 5 stars then. I typically don't love audio books but it was interesting listening to this since I'd read it before. As the story unfolded I remembered parts of it although certainly not all of it. I'm not sure I'd still give this 5 stars, but certainly a strong 4. I love the sprawling story of all of the generations. I saw some criticism that Callie/Cal isn't particularly well developed and I agree with that. I felt I knew more clearly who Lefty, Desdemona and Milton were. I loved the references to Greek mythology and also the use of "Chapter 11" and "Obscure Object" as names. I think it was also interesting to re-read this considering how much more is known and discussed about gender identity these days.
I've had this to read forever, and even though I sort of fell out of SRC this season I was looking at my wishlist on overdrive and saw this audiobook available. I had forgotten it was even a group read (lol), but I knew there was some recent reason I wanted to get to it. I definitely enjoyed the audio overall though it did meander and get "off-topic" a few times -- of course eventually bringing those "OT" threads back into the narrative.
I agree that I wish there was more Cal/Calliope in the book than as narrator, but what was included was very moving in parts.
Morgan wrote: "I've had this to read forever, and even though I sort of fell out of SRC this season I was looking at my wishlist on overdrive and saw this audiobook available. I had forgotten it was even a group ..."Oh definitely, I think the book is great because it balances humor and sadness so well.
In many ways, I really liked this book. But a few things bothered me. Part of it, I think, is because we had it listed under "transgender fiction". But as a lot of people here mentioned, it really focused a lot more on the family history, and Desdemona in particular, that it did on Cal. And I think that all this time spent on the incest ... as soon as that came up I was ready to write the book off because I worry people will then make a connection between "transgender" and "incest", think transgender is then unnatural, etc. Plus, Cal was intersex, which many transgender people are not. I've read three books with intersex main characters, would like to read a book with a transgender main character who is not intersex. Surely these exist.Someone above mentioned "Chapter 11" above. I somehow got all the way through the (audio) book and didn't realize that was not his real name. I even made a comment in one of my updates like "when do we get to learn why the hell these people named their child Chapter Eleven??"
The Seasonal Reading Challenge
Books mentioned in this topic
Middlesex (other topics)Beloved (other topics)
Song of Solomon (other topics)
Middlesex (other topics)
Middlesex (other topics)
The requirement for task 20.10: You must participate in the book's discussion thread below with at least one post about the contents of the book or your reaction to the book after you have read the book.